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My Bresson baptism, with Mouchette: and it underwhelms. I’m sure I picked up Mouchette on strong recommendations: but it backfired.
Shot in black and white (1967), perhaps to accentuate the despair and and hopelessness of the theme, is a tactical mistake. I’m sure there are things you can do with black and white to accentuate particular objects, emotions, situations: as in Hitchcock’s movies. Here, we are treated to a washed out monotone of colour which does nothing for the many scenes shot in apparently verdant woods. Contrast was poor throughout, sharpness non existent: colour was a mismanagement.
Nadine Nortier is miscast as Mouchette. She has presence, but no qualia. Utterly emotionless throughout, even when she is crying, less of an enigma and more of a non person. What is she thinking, what is she about, what makes her tick? The blank canvass of her acting output throws up no answers. Marie Cardinal as her mother, in only a few short scenes with few words does a much better job of fleshing out a character: we, as the audience, get what she is about: a disillusioned, weary woman: physically and spiritually ill. Mistreated by life and men, she is ready to depart this life. Her agony , in fact her life story is played out beautifully in an understated way by Cardinal. Nortier does not come even close with her performance.
Mouchette is supposed to be a suffering martyr of some kind, but ‘m not sure why. Yes, the family is poor, mum is sick and dad goes out at night to deal in contraband, but is that enough to warp your mind and deaden your soul? Why does she refuse to sing in school and throw mud at her schoolmates? Bresson is just sloppy here: a few more psychological angle shots wouldn’t have been amis, just to really set the background on Mouchette’s despair.
A plot development sees Mouchette out in the woods late at night, huddled under a tree. She is found by Arsene, the village daredevil, who first ‘rescues’ her from the rain, then walks her back to the village, and to his house, where a little incongruously because there was no build up to this, rapes her. And Mouchette likes it. In fact the next day she alludes to him as ‘her lover’. Yes, she is sadly misused here.
Then, one hour into the film, a host of secondary characters start popping up for the first time. Mouchette’s mother dies on the morning after her rape, and as Mouchette walks about town to get milk, various personages make an appearance. All of them presume to help her with hand me downs and end up calling her a slut and wicked. For no particular reason at all. This grated on my nerves a bit: first, the glut of personalities piled up all at once: what about pacing, Bresson? Then, their allegations towards Mouchette. If she is indeed a slut, why weren’t we shown it, why wasn’t it alluded before: why spring it up out of the blue. Of course, this may be a subtle reference to the fact Mouchette enjoyed her rape, but of course the townfolk can’t know this.
The only thing this film had going for it is the ending. As Mouchette tumbles down a river bank and literally plops into the river, the camera stays put for about thirty seconds on the water, before fading out. Does Mouchette resurface, or is she dead?
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Gean Luc Goddard’s ‘Weekend’ is partially a misnomer: the action supercedes the eponymous weekend by nearly half a year.
Reminiscent of his Pierre le Fou, but only in a Queaneu ‘Exercises in style’ sort of way: e.g. how many different ways can you do ‘road trip’. More politically charged and if possible, more saturated in metaphor, the ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ travel in a ‘dark’ landscape of wanton destruction, chaos and societal breakdown.
The build up is nicely done: incremental accretion of horrors, so that just as the frog in the gradually boiling water feels it not, so the viewer here is gradually lulled into a quasi-acceptance of the most grotesque and horrific of ontological qualia. The travelling couple (off to see Madames dying father and collect an inheritance) first encounter traffic, a long, tedious, monotonous pile up which is accentuated (rather ironically) by a slow moving class of children by the road side; no matter how much the couple intercut and by pass, the children are always there, shuffling along. Moral of the story: things are going no where fast. The traffic quee itself is a harbinger of the absurdism in store going forward, as well as the initial stages of social breakdown.
Following this, a dystopian landscape littered with burned out cars and dead bodies lying in pools of blood. Any living humans exhibit behaviour which led to the killing of the corpses to begin with. Not only that, but now heavy symbolism descends: all characters appearing mi en scene are personifications: of political, social or philosophical trope. Literary characters bemoan the death of intellectualism, immigrants offer a diatribe on French colonial exploitation, and finally, revolutionaries charge on to the scene: and they, of course, are just as bad as their opponents.
In this nihilistic display of murder, violence and desecration of human spirit and flesh, I am reminded a little of Pink Flamingos, another film which crosses the rubicon. But here, its so much better. Goddard is careful to explain away the monstrosities with rather longish monologues, where the injustices of the world are highlighted. Thus, one can’t miss the message that violence begets violence.
Not that thats the only message, of course. Goddard is like a butterfly here: he skips from idea to idea til the viewer is dizzy with overexposure.
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Andre Breton’s ‘Nadja’ looks like a precursor to blogs, written in 1928. Andre Breton, writing as Andre Breton, spends the first half of the novel meandering through the streets of Paris, posting photos of his favourite haunts, and namedropping par excellence. . Engaging, but nothing that will set the world on fire.
Nadja appears halfway through the novel. Here, great speculation arises in the literary world: is she a real person, is she a manifestation of Breton’s persona, perhaps she is not so much a person as a ‘state of mind’.
The ruminations above are necessary to justify the mundane story of a married middle aged man embarking in an adulterous affair with a vulnerable younger woman who happens to be enthralled by his intellect and success as an author.
French people, of course, are going to have some lavisious twists: after all is this not the language that gave us ‘menage a trois’? At one point Breton discloses that he has spent a whole afternoon talking to his wife about Nadja and further on, just before Nadja is committed to an insane asylum, she phones Breton’s wife and tells her that she is her only friend in the world. Civilized, eh?
The two protagonists, Nadja and Breton talking, painting and walking about (with illustrations to back it all up). When I say talking, however, one mustn’t understand this to be a conversation of equals whereby two towering intellects are rationalised through a rhetoric of spiritual transcendence: oh no. Nadja’s most common contributions are ‘overdetailed accounts of scenes of her past life’ . As these details mount up, Breton appears to become more and more disenchanted with his ‘muse’, as if thought the brushstroke of quotidian events conveys a sense of ordinariness upon Nadja which he cannot tolerate.
What, then, is Nadja’s staying power? Breton states ‘ As for her, I know in every sense of the word, she takes me for a god, She thinks of me as the Sun.’ Nadja also happens to read his Manifesto and other writings in awe. Surrealism or not, at the end of the day its Breton basking in his own glory as reflected in the eyes of his naive young lover, who probably doesn’t know any better than to idolise without understanding (hence the motif of mysterious, inexplicable artistic creation). Having said that, many do bill this as a genuine surrealist love story.
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Perhaps because Vera Chytilova directed ‘Daisies’ in 1966, at the start of the Prague Spring, that subsequent viewers scramble in a mad rush to label the film as a feminist outcry against the patriarchal hegemony organised along communist themes of repressive theocracy.
Even without any prior knowledge of the historical context in which this film emanated, it works as a playful collage of surrealistic scenes which serve as an ironic lambast and a helping of satirical lashing against the entrenched consumerism and conventional normative of the day: a mad, bad, coming of age story embodying two young girls who decide that if the world is ‘so bad’, then they will be too.
How exactly is the world so bad, then? There is one very oblique reference to war in the very beginning of the film, but in general the themes which are propelled to the forefront and unpicked with gentle satire (well, and slapstick comedy, and cartoon animations, and lackadaisical fun-o-rama) focus on nihilism, hedonism, decay of moral values, ennui and lack of any productive and meaningful life goals. Rebelling against all this is perhaps the true definition of a ‘rebel without a cause’, and perhaps there is never any ‘age’ when disenchanted incumbents won’t have a go at the moral depravity of their peers, as each generation discovers anew the hypocrisy and disinterment between society paying lip service to social values and the underlying reality which ensconces the exact opposite.
So, Marie and Marie (our two protagonists), are going to be ‘bad’. But, not too bad: this isn’t going to be the Czech version of ‘a Clockwork Orange’ by any means. Bad here means taking unscrupulous old men for a ride: wizened insufferables who hope to score based on paying for a meal. Well, if eating their food and sending them on their way makes the two Maries bad, what in heavens name would they have done if they were ‘good’: succumbed to the wily charms of the octogenarians? Uugh, it doesn’t bear thinking.
Being bad is defined twice more in the film: once as the girls get tipsy in a cabaret and stage an impromptu side show in their cubicle as they start jiving: (quelle horreur!) and once more at the finale when they descend upon a baquet hall and proceed to systematically destroy the food plateau, the room’s fixtures and furnishing as well as the banqueting table and all the accoutrements on it. All this is done so playfully, gracefully, and sweetly that the viewers get swept up in the ride: we’re not indignant at the wanton destruction as these two scamps wallop, we’re enchanted: not least by the food fight and strip tease which culminate the scene.
But what happens next, the true denouement and final scene of the film, is an ironic take of double entendre which demands kudos. The two Maries decide they are going to try and make amends having wreaked havoc with the food hall. Why they decide this, remains unclear: is it because polit bureau apparatchiks are whispering sweet somethings in Chytilova’s ear? Is it because she wants one final stab at bohemian assertion? In any event, the two Maries are going to make good: they tell us so: ‘We shall be happy because we are good’ they say. But in a tonal chorus set to a grating repetitive basso continuo which leaves the audience in no doubt that they mean the opposite. Dressed in newspaper rags (which would probably have Lady Gaga enthralled if she had seen it BEFORE the meat dress), they trip around setting the banquet to rights. But just like Humpty Dumpty, they are never going to be able to put this together again. ‘Does it matter?’ asks Marie number 1. ‘No it doesn’t matter’ says Marie number two, and I can’t help cheering them on.
More helpful reviews of this great film can be found here. |
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Moroccan Chicken and Couscous Salad
Ingredients:
2 carrots, thickly sliced
1 celery stalk, thinly sliced
2 scallions, rinsed and chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 Chicken Breast Fillets, cut into strips (about 300g)
3tsp Ras El Hanout Spice Mix or Harrisa paste
400g can chopped tomatoes
200 ml hot chicken stock
410g can chickpeas
40g pack fresh coriander, chopped
1 red pepper diced
1 cucumber diced
200g couscous
Salt and black pepper to taste
Optional:
Crusty bread or pita bread
How to prepare:
1. Heat the oil in a large pan and add the onion, carrots, and celery.
2. Cover the pan and steam the vegetables over a low heat for about 8 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Scoop the vegetables out from the pan and set them to one side. Cover to keep warm. Now add the chicken strips and cook for a few minutes in the same pan until browned on all sides.
4. Stir in the spice mix or Harrisa paste and scallions and cook, stirring, for another two minutes.
5. Add the vegetables back to the pan, then add the tomatoes and the stock. Bring back to a boil.
6. Add the chickpeas, season and bring to a simmer for 20 minutes, covered, until the chicken is cooked through and there is no pink meat. Turn off the heat and stir in the coriander, peppers and cucumber, and cover to keep warm.
7. The cucumber should always be added raw to the mixture, however, the pepper can be added raw or cooked to taste. For sautéed pepper, include the pepper with the onions, celery and carrots in step one. For best results, peel if skin is blackened on the pepper.
8. To prepare the couscous, heat 25 grams of butter or two tbs oil in a heavy based pan. Add the couscous and stir over a medium heat for approximately two minutes. Switch off the heat and add 250 ml boiling water, and stir. Cover the pan and let the water soak into the couscous for at least five minutes. Switch on the heat again and warm gently for another minute, using a fork to separate the grains. For extra moistness add a splash of olive oil and stir through.
9. Serve the chicken and vegetables on top of the couscous, with a side of crusty or pita bread if desired.
10.Crusty bread and pita bread can be warmed under a moderate grill.
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 Take hypocrisy, mediocrity, prejudice, dogma, downright ignorance, a predisposition for pint sized mustachio-ed dictators, throw in vanity, season with pompous self confidence and wrap up in establishment garb for the socially acceptable face of middle class snobbery and righteousness.
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 This is the kind of book (goes down pat in under two hours, btw), where the reviews will utilise more lyrical lingua than actually sourced in the text: it is that sparse and economical with its prose. Written as if for children but with a message no child will understand, it invokes long forgotten memories of Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ and ‘The Little Match Girl’ (the ONLY tale, apart from Wildes ‘The Happy Prince’ which ever made me cry....and still does, even though now that I’m older and wiser it may be more of a Pavlovian response).
There is something about Scandinavians and snow: they do it like no one else on this earth: to describe the Ice Palace a la Andersen/Grimm/Vesaas mode requires more than just raw imagination: it takes perhaps a lifetime of a soul hued with the ice of the unforgiving Nordic North to be able to render it so profoundly.
And of course, the long, dark winters (the sun never rises for three months on end up there) are the perfect catalyst for a corresponding séance of depression and all the morbid, macabre mental flares that end up in informing so much of Scandinavian literature. I think.
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Point of fact: It is not humanly possible to figure out what exactly is happening in the Obscene Bird of Night (OBN). This may very well be the leitmotif of magical realism, but here, we have a splintering of human reality so profound that the whole piece fractures into miniscule shards which are propelled disparately away from the epi centre in furious motion, so when the dust settles, there is simply nothing tangible left to commemorate the premise.
The skeleton of OBN is framed by the multiple narrative of ostensibly one character, Humberto, who morphs continuously into a (eunuch?)deaf-mute, a newborn baby, and finally, into an Imbunche. The narrative modes vacillate between ‘You’, ‘I’, ‘He’ and ‘We’, and it can’t be ascertained if any of the different manifestations of the same character are real or a figment of his imagination. The collapse of reality is woven together through the ideological model of Chilean imbunche myth and anchored, if that concept even exists, via the Casa de ejercisios espirituales which, with its labyrinthine, impregnable passages, informs the actual formation of characters. (a well known, well tested ploy: think Egdon heath in Hardy’s ‘Return of the Native’, as well as many more examples).
The question, then, is OBN likeable? Too often I felt emotionally detached from the unfolding surrealistic vignettes. On a clinical level, I’ve traversed enough through the annals of literature to grasp the main thrust of OBN: Yes, the collapse of external reality, the denouncement of a fractured society, the purported destruction of consciousness, and the multiple perspectives of the same reality.
The easiest trap to fall into here, is to obsess about the overtly prevalent theme of self-destruction, which on reflection, I don’t believe underpins the novel at all. True, Ariel Dorman posits that the auto destruction of Donoso’s character(s) is the result of their untenable position in Latin America, a region identified through prolonged violence, where desperation forces people to ultimately direct their energy in destructive patterns against themselves. I simply didn’t see this. In fact, Donoso himself has this to say about his worldview: ‘Al describir un personaje lo desintegro. Un personaje es, por decirlo asi, treinta personajes y un solo’. And then there is the following: Donoso rewrote this novel in 5 months after originally taking 8 years to craft it, after a bout of temporary insanity induced by morphine after a haemorrhaged ulcer. He rewrote it, ‘dandole el orden que me habia sugerido la locura’. Or, to sum up these two points, the acute interest in multiple personalities may have less to do with socio-political considerations and more with Donoso’s personal preference to view reality through a kaleidoscope. In any event, I don’t see any self destruction of the self/consciousness at all. Fragmentation, yes. Collapse of unity, yes. But turning into an imbunche does not necessarily portray an annihilation of the id: Dividing and unifying into a mythical character represents to me a personal catharsis, the genesis of a creative process whereby the returning to a simpler form of life is not destruction but salvation of the soul.
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Who, I ask, is it that decides : yes, I am going to publish Betty Posor's @Shelley' and make people pay money for it? Well, Tim Sharp apparently.
And here it is:
Always faithful
Always true
Licks my tears when I am blue
Plenty of long talks
Plenty of long walks
Quick, turn the page over: that must have been a joke. OK, now we have Elizabeth Docherty with 'Trouble where'.
When in trouble you see no end
Look to Jesus he is your friend
To keep his rules which do not bend
He made this world which has no end.
Have I picked up children's verse here? Checking - no, its definitiely adult poetry. Strange.
M Taylor then, an 'easy catch':
Pussy went a hunting, caught a little mouse
held it by the tail and brought it to the house.
I must be in the twilight zone. This is surreal. Perhaps someone else might care tohave it, not me.
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Thomas Ligotti has, in essence, compiled a huge reading list of notable names in the field of Pessimism vs. Optimism philosophical debate, and diligently extracts the leitmotif and central premise of said philosopher/scientists. The end result is a smorgasbord offering of essential concepts and theories which underpin the rendering of existence. Ligotti particularly appeals as he is careful not to (overtly anyway) weigh in definitively on either side of the argument.
Inevitably with a compilation such as this, some theories will seem familiar, others are entirely novel and many are, of course, controversial. Below are some of the ideas that stirred up my imagination.
I had not previously been aware of Mainlander’s ‘Philosophy of Redemption’ (but my excuse is that it has never been translated into English), however his beautiful premise that the Big Bang is actually God suiciding himself, as He could not bear his own existence, and that in seeking to nullify himself, god’s death (the big bang) brought about ‘life’. This must be the most flawlessly lyrical and novel interpretation of our ‘beginning’ that I know. Zapffe, whom I was not acquainted with before, posits that we deliberately ‘limit’ our consciousness in order to cope with the terror and dread of the unknown, as well as the knowledge that our existence is futile. This makes perfect sense although I would say our self-limiting exercises are in no way a conscious activity at all. We do not, I think, knowingly impose self limits: this is done on a sub level which is probably informed by more mundane factors such as biological and physical capacity of the brain to constantly keep processing new information. If I were to consciously question and second guess every move I make during the day I’d never get even out of bed.
And so, the debate whether life is worth living rages on. Ligotti acknowledges that most people by default find life enjoyable and good and worth living, because believing otherwise would lead to madness. How disappointing then his chapter on Buddhism: which he equates with the pessimism. 130 million people have accepted that suffering is a way of life, but in the West our home grown pessimists have no such following. Regardless what Buddhist THEORY may postulate, the population on the ground has most certainly not accepted suffering as a way of life at all. Whilst they are good to repeat some of the tenets as mantra, this is more an affirmation of knowing rather than accepting. I found a complete dichotomy between doing and saying on the ground. Which would seem to reaffirm Zapffe (and Ligotti’s ) premise that otherwise would be following the road to madness.
At a certain point it becomes apparent, that non partisan as he tries to be, Ligotti does not believe it is possible to assume that Sisyphus (of The myth of Sisyphus by Camus) was ultimately happy, meaning that we can’t assume a view of life that can content us with the tragedy, nightmare and meaninglessness of human existence. This thought gave me pause, but in the end I must reject it. As an aside, it is quite possible not to have to assume any such view at all, if you’re not aware of the nightmare of your life. I was exposed to unimaginable deprivation and horror in a village in Malaysia, but the inhabitants, isolated from the world, had no basis for comparison and thus did not assume their life was horrific. Not knowing anything else, they took their lot in stride and imagined that this is how it was for all and sundry, not a fate to lament but just the status quo. And even when faced with the futility of our existence, we still find a way to adjust, accept, and assume happiness: this even Ligotti acknowledges later in his book. Perhaps because in the absence of underlying psychological issues, the human mind simply isn’t geared (biologically)for prolonged periods of depression.
Much is made of the human interpretation and obsession with horror, and how this may translate into creating ‘an ominous state of affairs’ in literature which alludes to underlying horror. I’m not sure that an ominous state of affairs is a philosophically valid term. In as much as a state of affairs can only be a neutral state onto which we project our subjective interpretations, it would not necessarily be ominous to one and all. What I believe to be the underlying issue here is the concept of a differentiating factor: where a state of affairs appears to deviate from conventional norm, this very difference: whether ominous or not, is enough to provoke consternation. Not necessarily because, as Ligotti stipulates, that without the consciousness of death there would never have been a supernatural horror story written, but because fear of the unknown (and not just death) is a coping mechanism on a subconscious level which activates instinctually to protect us from danger. Ligotti claims vampires and zombis as carriers, nay embodiments of supernatural horror. Puppets who appropriate human characteristics are also singled out as ‘horrorful’. All tied in supposedly with our consciousness of death. However, a film such as ‘Planet of the Apes’ embodies no less ‘supernatural’ horror (in the classic definition of the latter), ; its ending does not allude to imminent death but the horror is very real: the horror of having to accept the complete and final loss of humanity. The horror of the unknown.
Of course Ligotti is best known for his horror and uncanny fiction, and its great to hear him talk about what motivated him to write this book. He also features on manysci fi sites and its always great to see what he’s up to next.
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